BLASS AND FLINDERS PETRIE
A very interesting attempt to bring the synoptic problem to a new critical test has latterly been made by Dr. Flinders Petrie in his work, The Growth of the Gospels as shown by Structural Criticism (1910). His starting point is the likelihood that logia, analogous to the non-canonical fragments discovered in recent years, were the original material from which the Gospels were built up. The hypothesis is prima facie quite legitimate, there being nothing to repel it. As he contends, there is now evidence that writing was in much more common use in some periods of antiquity than scholars had formerly supposed; and scraps of writing by non-scholarly persons, he argues, may have been widely current in the environment with which we are concerned. All the while he is founding on data from the Egypt of the third century for a Palestinian environment of the first; and he is obliged to stress the point that Matthew the tax-gatherer was a “professional scribe,” while his argument runs that Matthew used the detached jottings of other people, not his own. But let us follow out his thesis:—
We cannot doubt [writes Dr. Petrie] that such was the course of growth when we look at the logia. Those collections of brief sayings could hardly have come into existence if full narratives and sufficient standards of information in the Gospels were already circulating. They belong essentially to a preparatory age, when records were in course of compilation. But, once written out, they naturally survived side by side with the Gospels, which had only used a portion of their material.[1]
It is not quite clear whether Dr. Petrie meant here to claim not only that the so-called Logia Iesou published in 1897 and 1904 are anterior to and independent of the Gospels (though found only in third-century MSS.), but that they are on the same footing of credibility with the Gospels. This, however, seems inevitably to follow from his position, though it appears to suggest to him no difficulty about the general historicity of the Gospel story, which he too takes for granted. Let us then note the problems raised.
A main feature of Dr. Petrie’s inquiry is that, following Professor Blass, he insists on making the predictions of the fall of Jerusalem part of the early documentary matter collected in the “Nucleus” which for him is the equivalent of Weiss’s Primitive Gospel. The argument of Blass[2] is drawn from the case of Savonarola, who in 1496 predicted that Rome would be sacked, and that horses would be stabled in the churches, as actually happened in the year 1527. If such a prophecy could be made and fulfilled in one case, urges Blass, it might be in another; hence there can be no rigorous application of the canon, Omne vaticinium post eventum, which has been relied on by the modern school of critical theologians. Dr. Petrie appears to have made no investigation of his own, being content to quote and support Blass; and the point is well worth critical consideration.
Let us premise that scientific criticism, which has no concern with Unitarian predilections, stands quite impartially towards the question of Gospel dates. The modern tendency to carry down those dates, either for the whole or for any parts of the Gospels, towards or into the second century, is originally part of the general “liberal” inclination to put a Man in place of a God, though some believers in the God acquiesce as to the lateness of the act of writing. Those who have carried on the movement have always presupposed the general historicity of the Teacher, and have been concerned, however unconsciously, to find a historical solution which saved that presupposition. The rational critic, making only the naturalist presupposition, is committed to no set of documentary dates. And he is not at all committed to the denial that an inductive historic prediction, as distinguished from a supernaturalist prophecy, may be made and fulfilled. Many have been. Much has been said of the “marvellous prescience” of Burke in predicting that the anarchy of the French Revolution would end in a tyranny. He was in fact merely inferring, as he well might, that what had happened in the history of ancient Rome and in the history of England would happen in France. By a similar historical method several French and other writers in the eighteenth century reached the forecast of the revolt of the American colonies from Britain without getting any credit for divine inspiration. And so, perhaps, might Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth century predict a sack of Rome, and a Jew in the first century a sack of Jerusalem.
But let us see what Savonarola actually did. He was, so to speak, a professional prophet, and while he predicted not only a sack of Rome but his own death by violence, he also, by the admission of sympathetic biographers, put forth many vaticinations of an entirely fantastic character. Here again he might very well have a Jewish prototype. For us the first question is, What did he actually predict in history, and how and why did he predict it? In 1494 he seems to have predicted the French invasion which took place in that year. Villari asserts that he did so in the sermons he preached in Lent, but admits that “it is impossible to ascertain the precise nature” of the sermons in question.[3] Father Lucas goes further, and points out that there is no trace in them of the alleged prophecy[4] which Savonarola in his Compendium Revelationum (1495) claims to have made but does not date. Villari further admits that the sermons of that year are so badly reported
as to have lost almost every characteristic of Savonarola’s style. Their reporter, unable to keep pace with the preacher’s words, only jotted down rough and fragmentary notes. These were afterwards translated into barbarous dog-Latin—by way of giving them a more literary form—and published in Venice. For this reason Quétif and some other writers entertained doubts of their authenticity.[5]
Villari nevertheless is satisfied of it on internal grounds, and we may accept his estimate. The main allegation is that in 1494 Savonarola, who had for years been preaching that national sin would elicit divine chastisement,
in those Lenten discourses, and also in some others, foretold the coming of a new Cyrus, who would march through Italy in triumph, without encountering any obstacles, and without breaking a single lance. We find numerous records of these predictions, and the terrors excited by them, in the historians and biographers of the period; and Fra Benedetto reports his master’s words in the following verses [thus literally translated]:—